Season Rewards Revamp

We're making some changes to our season rewards payouts, starting with today's season. Here's the general breakdown of the changes:

Daily Rewards:

Gems payouts have been added.

***NOTE: GEMS CANNOT BE STOLEN FROM YOUR CHEST. PLEASE DON'T FREAK OUT ABOUT PEOPLE STEALING YOUR GEMS, IT WON'T HAPPEN***
Anyways, now that I've made that clear...

Smoothed out the gold payouts, increasing the top and bottom league payouts, while reducing others a bit. The largest amount that any league had its payout reduced was 50,000. On the other hand, we've increased the Legend I payout by 300,000 as a bonus for top players.

Smoothed out honor payouts, reducing some league payouts and increasing others.

League Up Rewards:

Gem payouts removed

Honor payouts reduced

End-Of-Season Rewards:

Gold added

Token payouts have been smoothed out, increasing some and decreasing others. No payout was increased or decreased by more than three tokens.

Gems removed

Boss 100 Rewards:

Gold payouts have been added

Gems and Medals of Honor reduced

Tokens removed

This is admittedly a complex change. Some things were increased across the board, others were decreased across the board, some changes vary by league, and some things weren't changed at all. The main goal of these changes is to make daily rewards feel more rewarding, but that meant we had to reduce other payouts, like Honor. The amount of Gems you can get by consistently collecting your daily rewards will meet or exceed the number of gems that you were able to get from league up and end-of-season rewards combined. We think that the sum total of these changes is positive for the players and hope you will think so too.

Happy dungeoneering!

EDIT: I wrote this up a bit hastily and accidentally said that the gem payouts from daily rewards would always exceed the number you got from league up and end-of-season rewards combined. I made a mistake in my calculations. Some of them stay the same, some go up, but none of them go down.

Additional from @xtmn8r:
FYI, there is another change not mentioned here. The new seasons will allow the player to carry over 80% of their trophies (maximum of 32,000) vs the old system of 50% and 20,000.
NOTE: This first season will start 50% lower as the old/current season still reduces it by 50%. So a bit of an extra climb then will normally happen with the new system.

The main goal of these changes is to make daily rewards feel more rewarding, but that meant we had to reduce other payouts, like Honor.

I PVP primarily for the honor. With the revamp, battles are longer and I struggle to keep my win rate up ultimately making honor harder to get. Now Honor is reduced and will be EVEN harder to get?! Why Joel, Why?

This is going to sound overly critical of a change that supposedly will result in more rewards for everyone, but I mean it as an honest question...

Given the apparent minimal development resources available to address the increasingly desperate state of pvp, the ever growing list of bugs that are never even acknowledged nevermind fixed, the anemic pace of PvE content (boss mode has been half done for how long now???), the totally unbalanced hero rosters, and real player concern over long term direction and viability...was a wholesale redo of reward structures really something that required time and attention? Was anyone complaining about the league reward tiers not being “smooth” enough? Shouldn’t this kind of thing be about as far down the list of priorities as it’s possible to be?

This is going to sound overly critical of a change that supposedly will result in more rewards for everyone, but I mean it as an honest question...

Given the apparent minimal development resources available to address the increasingly desperate state of pvp, the ever growing list of bugs that are never even acknowledged nevermind fixed, the anemic pace of PvE content (boss mode has been half done for how long now???), the totally unbalanced hero rosters, and real player concern over long term direction and viability...was a wholesale redo of reward structures really something that required time and attention? Was anyone complaining about the league reward tiers not being “smooth” enough? Shouldn’t this kind of thing be about as far down the list of priorities as it’s possible to be?

While I have no problem with the issues you brought up - you assume the same people are responsible for everything. Reward changes are just simple amount changes in a file - most of the others require development, art, interaction testing etc. Basically apples to oranges.

This is going to sound overly critical of a change that supposedly will result in more rewards for everyone, but I mean it as an honest question...

Given the apparent minimal development resources available to address the increasingly desperate state of pvp, the ever growing list of bugs that are never even acknowledged nevermind fixed, the anemic pace of PvE content (boss mode has been half done for how long now???), the totally unbalanced hero rosters, and real player concern over long term direction and viability...was a wholesale redo of reward structures really something that required time and attention? Was anyone complaining about the league reward tiers not being “smooth” enough? Shouldn’t this kind of thing be about as far down the list of priorities as it’s possible to be?

While I have no problem with the issues you brought up - you assume the same people are responsible for everything. Reward changes are just simple amount changes in a file - most of the others require development, art, interaction testing etc. Basically apples to oranges.

I’d normally agree with you, but I think their situation is a little different. They’ve made past comments about being resource limited, we’re currently delayed on tower issue fixes because the one person assigned to work on it has been out sick, etc. They have a very small team. Whoever was in charge of these changes had to spend some significant time researching participation rates, tallying rewards, proposing changes, presenting to the lead, implementing (and yes, would take some minor graphics changes on rewards screens), testing. All that time spent was time not spent on some other initiative.

Well, before any real comment can be made, we need to first see what the daily payouts of gems are like... although I don't have high expectations since Joel didn't spell out the amounts. For the sake of those who regularly start from Warlord I on to Legend I, both Top 100 travellers and those who are statisfied just reaching L1, the total gem payout is 1,150 gems (including End of Season).

So it is to be assumed daily gems will exceed 1,150 gems, but by how much is the pivotal point here.

Edit Add: So Joel as modified the statement concerning gem totals, saying "some will stay the same, some will go up". Will this mean that daily gems are actually going to be a dynamic number depending on normal league bracket? Or it an inclusive calculation including Top 100 brackets' reduced gem payout? Or both? Once again, we will see soon enough, but for those who mathematically plan ahead to optimize, will be a bit of a rough week.

My instant reactions are a significant reduction in gem rewards and an increase in gold to attempt to mask this... I am sure some people need gold. I have 350,000,000. I don’t think this will be good...

As mentioned above with all the bugs and issues in PvP, it seems harsh to nuke the actual rewards people want.

The only way any of that sounds like a good thing is if the daily gem rewards are decent...idk what I'd consider decent, but otherwise it just sounds like everything was reduced or removed almost across the board, BUT we're going to get more gold...yay

FYI, there is another change not mentioned here. The new seasons will allow the player to carry over 80% of their trophies (maximum of 32,000) vs the old system of 50% and 20,000.
NOTE: This first season will start 50% lower as the old/current season still reduces it by 50%. So a bit of an extra climb then will normally happen with the new system.

I think your comment about getting to L1 sooner is the real important part. The goal with daily gems now will be to get to L1 as quickly as possible. The only way to do that is to spend gems. If you slowly use your 10 free raids a day and climb up say one League a day, you're going to lose a lot of daily gems that you could have gotten if you would have just rushed right into L1. The only way to get to L1 quickly is going to be to spend gems and refresh your raids. It

Edit: ah, math can be hard. The 80% change will keep you in L1. So that part won't affect it other than this first season.

Old System
850 gems from starting in W1 and ending in L1
300 gems from season
= 1,150 gems

Add in the 600 gems from being in the bottom half of Top 100 as a baseline
= 1,750 gems

Following was edited to correct the inclusion of non-existent bracket gem rewards

New System
1,130 gems total daily collection for being in L1 by Thursday mid-day reset (including the 80 for starting in W1 on first day(
No end of season gem rewards
= 1,130 gems

Add in the 100 gems from being in the bottom 100
= 1,230 gems

Of course, adding in the new 32K Trophy rollover, thus allowing one to start in L2 adds in another 45 gems (starting next week if you hit the 64K threshold this week), yet that is still only 1,175 gems for being in the bottom 100.

It seems like they basically decreased the overall Honor and Gems and then boosted the gold payout across the board. I don't know about anyone else, but Honor and then Gems are my top 2 PvP concerns; the Gold is nice, of course, but my priority are buying Superior Season runes (Honor) and making Superior Ultras (Gems). The extra 4M gold is cool and all, but you're punishing folks who can't jump from 20K to 40K is a day (at least for this season).

I really don't get it. There are so many quality of life improvements that everyone has been asking for for years (hero sorting, quick select teams, blocked sparklies). On top of that, there is so much stuff broken in this game that there are 10+ posts daily complaining about it (tower, hero balance). You ignore all of our requests / complaints and instead waste development cycles to implement a change that nobody asked for or wanted? This change makes pvp pointless after hitting L1, and you need less raids to get there after this season. Along with the QL GG, basically, you're discouraging people from playing this game.

Do 6 PvP matches a day and you will reach Legend I every season. With no new runes, there is no longer any incentive for a person to PvP. Help me understand the motivation behind reducing people's interest in playing your game?

I really don't get it. There are so many quality of life improvements that everyone has been asking for for years (hero sorting, quick select teams, blocked sparklies). On top of that, there is so much stuff broken in this game that there are 10+ posts daily complaining about it (tower, hero balance). You ignore all of our requests / complaints and instead waste development cycles to implement a change that nobody asked for or wanted? This change makes pvp pointless after hitting L1, and you need less raids to get there after this season. Along with the QL GG, basically, you're discouraging people from playing this game.

I rarely post anything negative, but this change disgusts me.

I agree for the most part -- I don't think this change disgusts me, but I do wonder why time/effort was put in to fix a system that didn't seem to be broken.

Do 6 PvP matches a day and you will reach Legend I every season. With no new runes, there is no longer any incentive for a person to PvP. Help me understand the motivation behind reducing people's interest in playing your game?

You mean you don’t want a third round of this week’s triple-undesirable-stats-that-don’t-even-go-together-plus-electric skin rune???

Kind of lost in the shuffle of this garbage, but worth pointing out anyway:

Why do you guys insist on blowing smoke up our **** every time you reduce gem payouts for something as if we aren’t going to realize what’s happening?

-Remove gems from guild rewards because “we think everyone will enjoy having the summons instead.” (while giving fewer equivalent summons)
-Lower tower gem payouts because “we want to spread them around to make daily quests mean more.” (while lowering total you can get)
-Reduce league rewards because “we wanted to smooth out the curve.” (while boning top 100 players out of hundreds a week)

If you think gem payouts are too high, just come out and say so. It’s insulting and patronizing that you always try to sell these changes as a positive for us by shuffling around different tiers and currencies to create a smokescreen, when anyone with 3rd grade math skills can see otherwise.

So here's why I'm confused about this changes. The rewards for reaching Legend I have remained basically the same. More gold, less honor. But the rewards for the Boss 100 have been massively reduced without any balance.